Shooting RAW gives you much more freedom to choose how a photo will be processed than letting the camera make some set of default choices about color rendering so it can spit out a JPG.
Yup - you can even use RAW processing from other sources and not just the camera manufacturer. If you only ever save JPEGs on camera then you are completely at the mercy of the camera manufacturer with no way to every change it if you don't care for the way it processed the raw image into the JPEG.
